


the only silent creatures in these woods

by singabattlesong



Series: tinker trailer (soldier, spy) [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Camping, Depressed Steve Rogers, M/M, Pining, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-02-23 01:02:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23736565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singabattlesong/pseuds/singabattlesong
Summary: In which the soldier needs to gather intel, and he doesn't leave his best source of data lying by the side of the river.Or: Steve wakes up chained to a mattress and finds he doesn't mind it so much.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: tinker trailer (soldier, spy) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1722259
Comments: 26
Kudos: 219





	the only silent creatures in these woods

**Author's Note:**

> I imagine there are a thousand stories with the premise that Bucky "kidnaps" Steve after CATWS, but in the words of my people, uh, more cake??

The only thing he feels when he wakes up that first time is disappointed. By habit, the feeling is left unarticulated. It is not something you put into words. What would he say? _Still here, huh?_

He surfaces enough to register pain and little else. When he sinks back into the dark, he knows he won't be allowed to stay there. Somewhere deep within his body, the tired man he no longer sees reflected in mirrors these days sighs and begins to ready himself to stand up and keep fighting.  
  


* * *

  
The pain is less when he wakes up again. The disappointment remains but is set aside with an ease that comes from long practice. He opens his eyes this time. He frowns.

A quick recon of his surroundings reveal a couple pertinent facts:

1) He is not in a hospital.  
2) He appears to be chained to his mattress.

“Huh,” he says, and immediately grimaces, because his throat hurts. He has a flicker of sense memory: a metal hand around his neck? No, that would have healed by now. What does it matter. This, too, will heal.

There is a bottle of water on a small table beside his bed, but he cannot lift his arms to reach it. He lets his aching, heavy head fall back against the scratchy mattress and closes his eyes. Just for a second. He'll get on with escaping in just a second.

He doesn't mean to fall back asleep, but like so often recently, things just aren't going his way.  
  


* * *

  
Fresh air.

The window above his mattress is cracked open, and a slight breeze knocks the blind an inch to and fro. Light slices inside every other second; something about the quality of it suggests greenery. Steve blinks up at it.

His thoughts come back to him all at once, sharp and impatient to resume action. He hitches up against the restraining chain around his torso and looks around again, taking note of the wood-paneled walls of the narrow room he is in; the small sink, counter, and two electric stove burners along the wall; the round corners of the blinded windows. He thinks he is in a camper.

He looks down. He has been stripped to his boxers and undershirt, both of which are stained with dried blood and sweat. The bullet wound in his abdomen must be completely healed, because he feels no pain with the curling motion. The mattress beneath him is bare, old, and feels like it's packed with springs and spite.

He could sit here and wonder why he is chained to a mattress in a camper, but it feels a little pointless. Well, he thinks. Might as well get on with it.

He is about to break the chains and make his escape when the small door opposite the sink creaks open, and Bucky hauls himself up into the camper. He stops abruptly when he sees Steve is awake. They stare at each other.

Steve should be breaking out of these chains and probably reaching for something to throw, but he doesn't move. He can't, he can only catalog: Bucky is dressed in civilian clothing. He has pulled his hair back from his face and tucked it under an anonymous cap. He's unshaven; his jaw as he looks back at Steve is tight with tension. His eyes are clear and present.

He's here, Steve thinks nonsensically. He is really here this time.

Steve passed out when he fell from the helicarrier. He must've hit the water like a missile. He wants to shake his thoughts, frantically drag his hands through them, sorting until he recovers what he missed: Bucky came after him.

He realizes his mouth is hanging open. He says, “Huh,” and closes it.

“Your healing rate, it's like mine,” says Bucky. And then, much more tersely: “Lie back. Idiot. You still have a hole in your stomach.”

“Yeah, and who put it there?” says Steve reflexively. He doesn't move but watches, fascinated, as Bucky makes some quick calculations. He can't know it, but his expressions are still the same, each shift of his eyes and tug of his mouth an intimate acquaintance of Steve's.

So he knows the very second he decides to play dumb.

“I don't know.”

“You don't know,” repeats Steve.

“I fished you out of the river,” he offers.

“And why'd you do that.” Bucky hesitates and he suggests, “You don't know?”

He realizes he is angry at the same time Bucky does. The other man's expression shutters and Steve notices with some dismay that this, too, looks familiar. Bucky spent a lot of the war concealing things.

What comes next comes quick; the metal arm reaches out and shoves him flat to the mattress and the soldier says, “I said. Lie _back._ ”

He is gone again before Steve can recover from his surprise and apologize or weep or maybe just yell some more.  
  


* * *

  
His thoughts go something like:

Bucky is here, he's alive, he pulled me from the river, if he pulled me from the river he must have remembered me, if he remembers me Bucky is here, he's alive, I'm not alone, I'm alive, I'm alive? I'm alive?  
  


* * *

  
He is done sleeping, apparently, so all he can do is lie there and try to get an occasional peek out the window. All thoughts of escape have been abandoned. He tells himself he is adjusting his strategy to fit the new parameters of the situation. Something inside him says maybe this _is_ the escape. He ignores it.

In the darkness behind his lids when he blinks, he sees again the ambivalent, sideways pull of Bucky's mouth, achingly familiar.

He shouldn't have snapped at him, he thinks, a sore weight spreading across his chest. The regret is seventy years old; they were never particularly gentle with one another. He always meant to be better about it. But Bucky felt like a part of himself, and Steve has always found it very hard to stop getting angry with himself.  
  


* * *

  
The hours stretch on and the light outside changes.

Steve, finally unable to ignore his thirst any longer, snaps the chain around his chest and reaches for the water on the bedside table. He drinks it down and then narrowly considers the dilemma of the empty bottle.

He swings off the mattress and tests his balance. When it doesn't appear like he is going to fall if he tries to walk, he creeps on light feet over to the sink, glancing around all the while.

The camper must be hooked up to a water source; what comes out of the small tap looks clean enough. He refills the bottle and replaces it on the bedside table. Curiosity demands he try to peak out one of the windows, but he doesn't want to risk the movement being noticed from outside.

He gets back on the bed. He hefts the chain with regret, wishing there was a way to reconnect it. Eventually he slides his feet beneath the chain around the bottom of the mattress and tucks the loose ends of the first beneath him. It won't stand up to a close inspection, but he's kind of counting on Bucky not wanting to get too close for a while.

He doesn't think about what he's doing, or not doing, too closely. He's had a lot of practice, so it's not hard.  
  


* * *

  
It is dark when Bucky returns to the camper. The door slaps open and he enters carrying a small brown paper bag. He doesn't look over at Steve.

“I hope that's food,” he says. He keeps his tone easy. It's the same voice he uses with strangers or the public or his former colleagues at SHIELD. He can do this.

Bucky doesn't reply, but he starts taking items out of the bag; it is food. Cans. A few brown potatoes. A loaf of bread, unsliced. More cans. Spam. For a guy who claims to have no memory of his past, Buck sure did a good job grabbing groceries straight out of 1940.

“So,” says Steve, “does this thing have lights or do you prefer cooking in the dark?”

“I can see in the dark,” reports the soldier.

Steve can too. Look at everything we still have in common! he doesn't say. “Well – still.”

After he finishes taking all the food out of the bag, Bucky reaches behind without looking and hits the flat switch beside the door. The overhead panel flickers on, and the camper is suffused with a sickly yellow light. It does nothing kind to Bucky's unwashed hair or pale, stubbled face.

He is still the most beautiful person Steve has ever seen.

He wants to shut his eyes and never open them again; he wants to ask for paper and a pencil and start sketching.

He doesn't realize he has groaned until Bucky is suddenly looming at his side, brow knit. “Are you in pain.”

And then he has a hand on Steve's stomach. His human hand. Bucky's hand. Steve blinks wildly at it for a second before realizing the other man is trying to check the bullet wound. This is the closest Steve has come to a tender touch in years.

He says thickly, “No, no, I'm – fine. I think it's all healed.” And then: “Sorry.”

Bucky pulls his hand back and looks down at Steve with something like disbelief. “You're apologizing?”

“Yes?” Steve could have said sorry once a minute for the entire seventy years he was in the ice, and he still won't have made amends.

“You're an idiot.” Bucky goes back to the counter and his food pile. He lifts a can and proceeds to tear open the top with all the ease one might peel off a sticker from a piece of fruit.

Steve's dick twitches.

He shuts his eyes then, because he thinks if he watches him for a moment longer, he'll lose what's left of his mind.  
  


* * *

  
“Where are we, anyway?” he asks eventually. This question is ignored.  
  


* * *

  
“Do you have a plan?” he asks. He doesn't mean to sound doubtful, but plans were always kinda his thing. The last time Bucky had a plan, he joined the Army and got captured by Hydra and tortured and look how that all turned out. Not that Steve blames him for it, that would be – wrong, and not helpful, besides. But he is a big believer in at least attempting to avoid past mistakes.

(This question is also ignored.)  
  


* * *

  
“Do they think I'm dead?” he asks.

Bucky has been staring sightlessly at the small pot of boiling potatoes, but at this question he turns and looks at him for a long, speculative moment. He says, “They found your shield. They're still dredging the river for your body.”

“Oh.” Steve doesn't know how to feel about this news. He thinks about Sam and Natasha, and feels a faint pang of something like guilt.

When dinner is ready, Bucky piles all of the food in the one pot: the potatoes and the heated beans and pork. He always hated doing dishes; Steve thinks this thought like it's nothing, like this is all normal, and his throat closes up on the tail of it.

He watches Bucky stare between the pot and the mattress, and realizes he is trying to decide whether to unchain him so he can feed himself. He suspects a fight is inevitable if Bucky realizes he isn't actually restrained anymore, and he's tired of fighting. So he tries very hard to look like he is chained but unhappy about it.

Bucky hooks the back of the one chair in the camper and swings it over beside the bed. He puts a dish towel – where and when did the soldier pick up a _dish towel_ , Steve thinks, highly distracted – on his lap and rests the hot pot on it. He dips a spoon in to the pot and tastes the food. His expression doesn't change, but it must pass muster because the next spoonful appears in front of Steve's face.

He looks at it, nearly going cross-eyed, it's so close. He looks back at Bucky. “Are you serious?”

“You're hungry, aren't you. You want to eat, eat.” This final word is accompanied with a slight nudge with the spoon. A bean tips off the side and lands on Steve's chest. It's not like his shirt wasn't already a lost cause, but still.

It's not the first time he's had to be assisted eating. This is like when he had pneumonia when he was nineteen. He thinks about it for a second, remembers that time in his life when Bucky was the only person alive who wouldn't turn his back on him no matter how frustrating or useless he was.

He says, “This is like when I had pneumonia when we were nineteen.” Bucky's stony expression doesn't change. “You remember that?” asks Steve, testing, “When we were nineteen, and I – _mmph!_ ”

Bucky has shoved the spoon in Steve's mouth, and it's either take the food or allow it to join its fallen brother all over his chest.

Steve accepts the food and chews. It needs salt. Among other things.

“You didn't talk this much when you had pneumonia,” says Bucky.

Steve's eyes snap up, and he stares at him, wide-eyed. Bucky looks faintly like he's bracing himself for a big reaction, and it is only this that stops Steve from lunging up from the bed, broken chain be damned, and hugging him. He breathes carefully through the want until the pressure passes.

He nods to the pot. “That's gonna get cold.” Not that it could taste much worse than it already does.

The apprehension gives way to clean irritation. Steve thinks if Bucky calls him a punk or something, he will do something that will be highly embarrassing for them both, even though it might get him shot again. But instead Bucky returns to the pot and lifts the spoon once more.

It's the best meal Steve's had since he woke up in New York two years ago.  
  


* * *

  
After dinner, Bucky lifts Steve's filthy t-shirt and peels back the bandage on his abdomen – it looks like a battle dressing, Steve notices, exactly the kind they were trained to use with the Howling Commandos.

Bucky stares down at the healed skin. Aside from an angry red mark that will fade completely in a few days, Steve looks like he never took a bullet at all. He is past minding his inability to scar. Mostly.

“You heal like me,” says Bucky quietly.

“You mentioned that.”

“Did they... were you also—?”

Steve's fists clench helplessly at his sides as he realizes what he's asking. He thinks of finding Bucky down in that filthy lab in Austria, insensate and in pain. The way he accepted Steve's sudden presence and changed appearance with so few questions. How it must have felt for him, then, to be so relieved to see a familiar face, he embraced what he surely must've assumed was a fundamental fracture in his sanity.

Steve forces his voice to remain neutral when he says, “Not like what they did to you. I – I chose this.”

He hides it away very quickly, but for a horrible second, Bucky looks like he finds this, and Steve, obscene.

Steve rushes to ask, “Why'd you take me here? Why take me at all?” _Why'd you pull me from the river, why'd you save my life? What do you remember, Buck?_

He seems to realize he is still touching Steve and retracts his hand, but he doesn't stand or move away. “Data gathering,” he says. He meets Steve's eyes squarely, but there is no warmth there. “You claim to know me, and I don't know if you're telling the truth – don't _interrupt_ , Jesus Christ, what's wrong with you?” After a moment of glaring, he continues, “You claim to know me, and it's not like I have a lot of other intel at my disposal right now.”

Steve waits a beat to make sure he has finished speaking, and then he manages, “The Smithsonian has an, an exhibit. On us.” Bucky stares blankly. He clears his throat, shakes his head. “Yeah, never mind. Look, I'm not arguing—”

“It sounds like you're arguing.”

“Well, I'm not,” he argues. He takes a steadying breath and tries to smile; Bucky's stare grows, somehow, even blanker. “I want to help you, Buck. Whatever you need, whatever you – want. I'm here.”

“I know you're here,” says Bucky slowly, “I chained you to the bed.”

He stands and steps back over to the counter. He puts the pot down in the sink and doesn't fill it with water to soak or nothing before turning and banging back out of the camper.

Steve looks at the pot. He looks at the door, and the narrowing glimpse of dark night he can see as it closes: trees, trees, and more trees. He sighs and puts his head back on the mattress.  
  


* * *

  
If Bucky sleeps, he doesn't do it inside the camper. Steve thinks about getting up and going after him approximately one hundred times, his gut screaming every second Bucky is out of his sight is a second he could be lost again. Every time he counsels himself to be patient.

There is no clock in the camper, so he doesn't know how late it gets. He doesn't sleep. Steve is intimately acquainted with the taffy-stretch of insomnia time, how minutes can bead up like condensation on a cold window and run together. Tony Stark once tried to get him to try meditation, but it turns out Steve was too angry to quite manage it.

Nearby outside, three sharp pops go off in quick succession: gunfire with a silencer, his brain registers, and he's off the mattress and out of the camper before it can deduce anything else.

They are in a small clearing in a forest, turns out. Pine needles and leaves under his bare feet, a cool breeze brushing his arms and legs. He pants like he's run thirty miles and looks across a small campfire at Bucky, who is sitting hunched on a log and staring up at him.

He says, “I thought – I heard a, a—”

Bucky glances at the fire. “Wood's a little wet,” he says. His face is painted in soft tones from the flames. “You are not chained to the bed,” he observes.

“No.” He tries, ineffectually, to calm down.

“You sat in there all day under a chain you could've broken at any time?”

“I was where I wanted to be,” he says, helpless.

“Jesus Christ,” is the verdict.

Steve points at the log. “Can I sit?”

“Apparently I can't fuckin' stop you,” says Bucky, but he shifts so there is space to his right.

Steve settles on the log. He feels the heat of the fire against his shins and stretches his hands out toward it. He shuts his eyes and tries to breathe past the weight on his chest. He feels like he is nineteen and asthmatic again.

He is not one for leaning on anyone or anything, but he wants very badly, just then, to slump against Bucky like he might have once before. The inches between them feel like a chasm begging to be jumped. He holds himself back, though, because unlike before Bucky isn't asking him to make the attempt.

The night is much louder outside the camper, he notices: the dance of the tree branches overhead, the insects chirping and animals rustling. It feels a little like they are the only silent creatures in these woods.

Bucky tosses another anemic pine log onto the fire. When he settles back in place, his shoulder brushes Steve's and he says, “I remembered something.”

Steve says, guarded, “Yeah?”

Bucky angles a look at him, eye contact sparking hot and glancing like a bullet. He says, “I remember I hate camping.”

And his mouth hooks up into a small, wry smile. For a moment, it could be the war again, and the two of them sitting up in a field in Europe somewhere – but it's even better, isn't it, because it's _now_.

Steve has witnessed and felt miracles in his lifetime but none match this: the two of them sitting here, side by side once more. With a glance and five words, Bucky has somehow hauled Steve out of memories and into the present.

His grin breaks free across his face. Bucky withstands it, still smiling slightly, and in the light of the campfire his eyes look merely dark instead of shadowed.

They wait out the night: their first night.


End file.
